Two years ago Jed Rakoff, senior judge for the Southern District of New York, embarrassed both the Securities and Exchange Commission and Citigroup by rejecting a deal to relieve the bank of guilt for cheating its customers out of more than $700 million by selling them bad mortgages. This month, in the pages of the Jan. 9 issue of The New York Review of Books, he stepped forward from the bench once again to criticize the mindset that both led to that deal and produced the financial crisis.
“Who was to blame” for the recession that forced “millions of Americans” into “lives of quiet desperation: without jobs, without resources, without hope”? he asked. “Was it simply a result of negligence. … Or was it the result, at least in part, of fraudulent practices?”
